18. I
can tell you of something which may make him still dearer to us, though
more odious to you. A short time ago, the faction of the heretics which
was scattered away from Egypt and Alexandria came to Jerusalem, and
wished to make common cause with him, so that as they suffered
together, they might have the same heresy imputed to them. But he
repelled their advances, he scorned and cast them from him: he told
them that he was not an enemy of the faith and was not going to take up
arms against the Church: that his previous action had been the result
of vexation not of unsoundness in the faith; and that he had sought
only to prove his own innocence, not to attack that of others. You
profess to consider an imperial rescript upsetting an episcopal decree
to be an impiety. That is a matter for the responsibility of the man
who obtained it. But what is your opinion of men who, when they have
been themselves condemned, haunt the palaces of the great, and in a
serried column make an attack on a single man who represents the faith
of Christ? However, as to my own communion with the Pope Theophilus, I
will call no other witness than the very man whom you pretend that I
injured.31783178 Theophilus himself. His letters were always
addressed to me, as you well know, even at the time when you prevented
their being forwarded to me, and when you used daily to send letter
carriers to him repeating to him with vehemence that his opponent was
my most intimate friend, and telling the same falsehoods which you now
shamelessly write, so that you might stir up his hatred against me and
that his grief at the supposed injury done him might issue in
oppression against me in matters of faith. But he, being a prudent man
and a man of apostolical wisdom, came through time and experience to
understand both our loyalty to him and your plots against us. If, as
you declare, my followers stirred up a plot against you at Rome and
stole your uncorrected manuscripts while you were asleep; who was it
that stirred up the pope Theophilus against the public enemy in Egypt?
Who obtained the decrees of the princes against them, and the consent
of the whole of this quarter of the world? Yet you boast that you from
your youth were the hearer and disciple of Theophilus, although he,
before he became a bishop, through his native modesty, never taught in
public, and you, after he became a Bishop, were never at Alexandria.
Yet you dare, in order to deal a blow at me, to say “I do not
accuse, or change, my masters.” If that were true it would in my
opinion throw a grave suspicion on your Christian standing. As for
myself, you have no right to charge me with condemning my former
teachers: but I stand in awe of those words of Isaiah:31793179Is. v. 20 “Woe unto them that call evil
good and good evil, that put darkness for light and light for darkness,
that call bitter sweet and sweet bitter.” But it is you who drink
alike the honeywine of your masters and their poisons, who have fallen
away from your true master the Apostle, who teaches that neither he
himself or an angel, if they err in matters of faith, must not be
followed.